Prayer Flags
by Scarlet Compass
Summary: Could she be the one that all those monotonous therapists told him about, the one that he would WANT to tell, would want to know the bitter-sweet moment he clung to, even after the end?  Hints of A/A relationship at the end, as per usual.


**Hey, Scarlet Compass here. I just wanted to let you know that this may appear tenacious at first, but I beg you to read carefully before skipping ahead to the dialogue. This one-shot occurred to me while sun-baking on shore of a lake. I FINALLY finished it!**

He knew she was watching him. She knew he knew she was watching him. Yet neither could muster the energy to call on the other. Annie stood in the entrance to his office, at a loss. What does one say when a close friend is forced to relive one of the worst times of his life? Auggie, surprised he had enough space in his head to acknowledge the emotion, realized he felt sorry for her. The same sorrow he felt for his family when they first met up with him after the Accident. She wanted to comfort him, but like everyone else, she couldn't understand. They had tried to avoid addressing his blindness, and became very cautious with him, as if he was made of blown glass. He was blind, not brittle-boned. It appears that with friends and family, there's no distinction. Auggie resigned himself to the fact that she would act much the same way now, of all people. Then again, how could he blame her, after what she'd seen, what she'd discovered?

Two days ago word was going around the proverbial water cooler that Joan had an ops team checking in with a status report on a terrorist group targeting outposts and small cities in Iraq, anywhere U.S. militia might set-up base. Annie knew that Auggie was in on whatever was going on, having seen him leave the debriefing room with Joan in deep discussion. That was really the only reason she paid close attention to the gossip. Well, she _really_ started to pay attention when Auggie's behavior took a nose dive shortly thereafter. Auggie was on edge. He was curt, polite when absolutely necessary, but tense. Not the Auggie she was accustomed to. Yesterday evening Joan called an emergency meeting, quickly stating that a particularly threatening terrorist group's top soldier had infiltrated the U.S. The ops team trailing his group didn't find out until it was too late to intercept him. Apparently the terrorist group was popular for their use of landmines and other pressure-triggered explosives. A recurring disguise used to camouflage mines over the years being a dead dog, the explosive surgically placed where the canine's heart once was. The same terrorist group Auggie had been investigating as a Special Forces Operative when he lost his sight. Annie had never felt such compassion as she did for Auggie at that moment of revelation.

The ops team reported in that a man on the inside informed them the terrorist was a suicide bomber assigned to detonate in a military base in Virginia. Annie had been swept up in the commotion, and somehow ended up on sight when the agency went in to take him out. She saw first-hand the sniper's bullet burrow into the front of the man's head, silencing the offender a precious moment before his finger finished the process of pressing down on the detonator.

She now understood her close friend's abrasiveness, but was struggling as far as what to say to him. From what Annie knew of Auggie's character, he would hate it if she gushed over him in pity. She couldn't, wouldn't do that to him, he would see it as the highest level of condescension. She stared hard at his strained features, his roguish grin gone from his handsome face. The knuckles of his left hand were white from straining around the stress ball which had lost its roundness some hours ago under Auggie's diligent ministrations. Annie's mouth curved in a sad smile, and finally took the silence breaking step through the doorway and into his office.

"Hi, Auggie." She said each word softly, firmly but distinctly separate from each other. Auggie's chest rose in an audible breath as she mapped out careful steps towards where he sat in his rotating chair. His head tilted towards her, but his gaze remained sightlessly fixed in front of him.

"Annie, I don't have the energy to reassure any more people of my mental health today. I don't need pampering, so if that's what you're here for, no offense, but you can turn _right_ back around and walk out that door." His tone was flat, as if he didn't even have the patience to suffuse his voice with anger, frustration. Annie sighed away the sting of his words, and finished her trek to his desk, resting her hip against its edge, and looked down at her closest friend. There was a question that had developed in her head over the past few days, she wasn't even sure what had sparked such a specific thought, but Annie found it falling from her lips, before she could decide whether it was appropriate or not.

"What was the most beautiful thing you saw before you lost your sight?" Auggie's face blanched at the same time as Annie's.

"Uh, _What_ did you ask me?" His tone was slightly choked in shock. Annie could almost imagine the sensation of literally putting one's foot in your mouth at that moment.

"Oh, um, God, that, came out _really_, that's not, um, I'm so sorry, Auggie, that was, well, tactless would be an understatement…"

"The morning of my accident." Auggie cut her off in a soft voice. She stared at him, and had to swallow thickly before she could find a tone that wouldn't choke or waver.

"Would you tell me about it? Because, you know I can be an, _excellent_ listener." He cracked a half-hearted smile at her soft jibe, but it didn't reach his eyes.

"You're learning." He smirked. He then brought a hand up, scrubbing his face, and then running his fingers through his hair slowly, as if trying to remember what if felt like, _looked _like. "You know, I always knew that day would come back to bite me in the ass." She frowned at his attempt at another smile, but it looked more like a grimace.

"We had just reached the outskirts of Tikrit, Iraq, there had been a caravan coming by one of the villages, and the camels had been carrying various explosives, the whole town was blown to kingdom come. We went in to evaluate the damage."

_The cool of the night blanketed him, the wind ripping through his hair, the soft rumble of the humvee engines, and the sand stinging his cheeks as it was kicked up by the spinning wheels. He could just make out the inconsistency in the smooth plane ahead of them. They had almost reached their destination. _

"By the time we had reached the village, any survivors had already run off in a panic, some of them wounded badly enough that they died shortly after. When we scoped out the perimeter, we found a woman with a piece of shrapnel lodged in her chest, she'd wandered close to a mile from the village in the cold before she finally dropped." He paused on a heavy sigh. "She'd been carrying her dead baby in her arms. Two months old, give or take, it was hard to tell which got her first, hypothermia or blood loss." He heard the appalled hitch in her breath, and hesitated. She hadn't asked for the gory details, he was merely indulging that dark part of him that wanted to make people see the grotesque brutality humans were capable of, to make them understand, to burden someone else's shoulders with it…he didn't want to know anymore. "uh-hemm, Annie, sorry, that was probably in the danger zone of 'TMI'." He didn't hear her chuckle, or any tale-tell signs of amusement, he hadn't expected to. He didn't expect the next words out of her mouth either:

"You don't have to keep that horror film you've put together locked' up in your head, Aug, it's ok. I can take it, say what you need to say, no inhibitions, or do you need some of that Patron in your desk droor to take care of that?" He couldn't help the small huff of amusement that passed his lips, even as his hands still crushed the poor stress ball between his long, strong fingers.

"I'll keep that in mind next time I feel like shaking someone's faith in humanity." It was dark humour, but an attempt to lighten the mood nonetheless. Annie smiled sadly and squeezed his forearm gently, before leaning back to her position against his desk. He sighed and reluctantly trudged on. "To cut out unnecessary, possibly scarring mental images, me and the other guys with me finished the sweep and went back to join with the rest of the unit. They had already begun searching the rubble for survivors, apparently there was an old man, but he, by the time we had gotten there, and the initial group finished removing him from the rubble, he was gone. It had been a small village, more of a semi-permanent nomad reserve, to be honest, so at least there weren't so many bodies to take care of." Auggie swallowed convulsively, his jaw muscles jumping as she saw his unfocused eyes burn with remembered carnage and disgust and loss. Annie wanted so badly to tell him that he could stop, but she could recognize the mesh of emotions roiling within him as he clawed his way through shunted memories and dealt with the latent feelings that came along with the experience as a consequence of ignorance. Annie had, not quite intentionally, cracked Auggie's carefully structured, ironically light-hearted façade for a moment, and was sucked up in the current of her best friend's past, now pouring out of him. She hated those lines of pain and stress bracketing from Auggie's depthless eyes, and couldn't stop herself from offering him a way out.

"Auggie, I-you don't have to sa—," he cut her off, his tone still strained but determined, soft, but firm.

"It's okay, Annie, I actually want to tell you, masochistic as that sounds…" he flashed the smallest of smiles in her direction, hoping it was reassurance enough for her, and continued on, an odd knotting sensation building in his stomach as he neared the point of this venture into his time in uniform. "I was scoping out a section of the village, looking for possible explosive materials that could be collected for the forensic detail, any missed survivors, stuff like that. It was a lot lighter now, you could see a good sixty meters anyway you looked, must have been minutes before the sun would break over the peaks of the mountain range," his voice trailed off, his glazed eyes farther away than Annie had seen in all her time working with him.

"There were these uh, prayer flags. For a second, I was sure I was seeing things; they were so out of sync with everything else in that hell-hole. Strung from opposite windows that hadn't been blown away by the, the raid."

_Soft yellows and blues and purples, most of them were thread-bare. The sun had just broken through the mountains on the horizon, and struck the fading flags, just, so perfectly, it was as if they were set ablaze. The watered down strokes of black ink, so graceful, so alien in the crumbling world around him, Auggie swore he must be looking at a painting._

"Well, Most of the words had been washed away, I, I remember wishing that I could have known, what they said. I'm not even sure how long I stood there, just staring at them, I just remember, thinking it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. I just remember, this, bittersweet feeling, as if I was saying good-bye to something, and I needed memorize every detail of that moment, that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't take this in."

_They were calling everyone back in to regroup. He could hear Dale's booming voice, bellowing his name. But he wasn't ready, he thought, a mild panic and stubbornness creeping up in his thoughts. He couldn't leave yet, he needed more time…to what? He shook himself, and blinked rapidly, his eyes inexplicably moist. The young soldier took one last glance at the scene before him: the sun had fully broken through the crags of the far off mountain range, its rays now kissing the rugged edges of concrete and precariously balanced rubble, all that was left of a peoples' home. So with a deep feeling of sorrow settling in his chest, and a horrible sense of foreboding, Auggie spun on his heel turned his back on the growing light, slowly treading back towards base camp._

"And, after that, we regrouped, cross-referenced support, and the day went on." He said on a long, soft sigh. Annie felt her chest muscles clench as she saw the curtains of the story, and on Auggie's moment of vulnerability, draw to a close. "We went out in our sections, on our regular routes, I was driving the humvee. I thought I saw a dead dog off the side of the road on the main into Tikrit, Bang-Boom, cue massive explosion," he brought his arms up to encompass the-besides them-empty office, "And here we are." He brought his hands back down, to grasp the arms of his chair, his eyes moving to every area of the room but the one Annie resided in. She slowly shifted off of his desk and knelt before him, and carefully placed her hands atop of his, she felt his wrists go taught in surprise.

"Aug, thank you, for telling me," she said softly, and swallowed, finding that she couldn't find the words to express how sorry she was, how grateful she was that he decided that he trusted her enough, and that she saw him as simply amazing, and, despite how it may sound to an outsider of their friendship, she wouldn't have him any other way. Instead she found herself clinging to his hands, and hoped that he might, through some weird, _Auggie Thing, _understand what she wanted to say. Annie looked up from their joined hands, to see him looking, somehow, directly at her, his smile wide, but tender, his eyes suspiciously bright. He turned his hands, palms up, to return her gentle pressure on his hands.

"Thanks for being you." Then, with a final squeeze, Auggie's eyes turned playful, his smile mischievous. "Now, I don't know about you, but all that _intensity_ wore me out, so how about heading out for some quality time with Jim Beam?" With a huff of amusement, she got up off her knees, keeping her hands linked with his, and pulled him up with her, bringing them chest to chest. One moment, Annie was smiling up into Auggie's smirking eyes, until they flickered with some emotion too quick for her to identify, then the next thing she knew she was gently crushed into a toned wall of warmth. It took her a moment to register his arms locked around her waist, before she realized she was being hugged. "_Thank you."_ It was soft and gruff, but unmistakable, its source coming from the area of her temple, where his chin rested. Annie wound her arms up around his neck, and buried her head against his broad shoulder, breathing in his scent of crushed pine needles and musk. After a moment he pulled away, smiled at her once again, and, taking a step away, offered his arm, crooked at the elbow. "Shall we precede, Miss Walker?" She smiled at him tenderly, though he couldn't see it. Sliding her arm atop his, she laughed.

"Lead the way, Mr. Anderson." She looked up just in time to see the wicked grin flash across his boyishly good looks.

"Absolutely...I'll drive."


End file.
